Being Watched

Overview

In her dance and performances of the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer famously transformed the performing body—stripped it of special techniques and star status, traded its costumes and leotards for T-shirts and sneakers, and asked it to haul mattresses or recite texts rather than leap or spin. Without discounting these innovations, Carrie Lambert-Beatty argues in Being Watched that the crucial site of Rainer's interventions in the 1960s was less the body of the performer than the eye of the viewer—or rather, the body as offered to the eye. Rainer's art, Lambert-Beatty writes, is structured by a peculiar tension between the body and its display.

Through close readings of Rainer's works of the 1960s—from the often-discussed dance Trio A to lesser-known Vietnam war-era protest dances—Lambert-Beatty explores how these performances embodied what Rainer called "the seeing difficulty." (As Rainer said: "Dance is hard to see.") Viewed from this perspective, Rainer's work becomes a bridge between key episodes in postwar art. Lambert-Beatty shows how Rainer's art (and related performance work in Happenings, Fluxus, and Judson Dance Theater) connects with the transformation of the subject-object relation in minimalism and with emerging feminist discourse on the political implications of the objectifying gaze. In a spectacle-soaked era, moreover, when images of war played nightly on the television news, Rainer's work engaged the habits of viewing formed in mass-media America, linking avant-garde art and the wider culture of the 1960s. Rainer is significant, argues Lambert-Beatty, not only as a choreographer but as a sculptor of spectatorship.

About the Author

Carrie Lambert-Beatty is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.

Reviews

“The book is a fantastic read and an exemplary text... a highly original analysis, this study is sure to become a classic.” — MJ Thompson, TDR: The Drama Review

Endorsements

"A brilliantly vivid description of Rainer, Judson, and art making in the 1960s, Being Watched sets a new scholarly standard for dance and performance studies. Combining impeccable archival work, a nuanced understanding of the drama of vision, and a lyrical sensitivity to movement, Being Watched is an absolute pleasure to read. In these pages, Rainer emerges as a muscular thinker, a complicated personality, and one of the most influential choreographers of our time. Great artists need great commentators and here we are fortunate to see a truly compelling duet."
—Peggy Phelan, The Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts, and Professor of Drama and English, Stanford University

"Essential reading for anyone with an interest in Yvonne Rainer and the dynamic relationship between advanced performance and the visual arts during the 1960's and 1970's. Being Watched zeroes in on the most basic fact about live performance: its ephemeral nature; and the book that results is a profound meditation on the problematic nature of 'seeing' itself."
—Roger Copeland, author of Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance

"In this terrific book, Carrie Lambert-Beatty digs deep into minimalist dance and performance from the 1960s, helping us see its engagement with burgeoning mass media, Taylorized motion studies, and rampant systems-think. Yvonne Rainer's compelling work is linked to Fluxus, Happenings, and other time-based art from this crucial decade—her abstract yet demotic means are brilliantly analyzed in relation to both spectacle and spectators in Being Watched."
—Caroline A. Jones, Director, History, Theory, Criticism Program, Department of Architecture, MIT

Awards

Honorable Mention, Music and the Performing Arts category, 2008 PROSE Awards presented by the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers.

winner, 2009 de la Torre Bueno Book Prize presented by the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS).